TOM EATON | Pravin doth protest too much, methinks

According to the South African legend of Ground-To-A-Halt Day (celebrated every February, and January, and also March and July, as well as June, September and most other months) if Pravin Gordhan emerges from his burrow and sees his shadow, there will be six more years of load-shedding, or seven, or maybe twenty.

On Wednesday, however, Ground-To-A-Halt Day came early as Gordhan upstaged the budget speech to tell Andre de Ruyter that getting poisoned by the mafia was merely a “political view” and that the Eskom CEO should rather just shut up and keep letting the ANC get on with the important work of imploding the country.

To be clear, I’m always very glad when Gordhan wipes the sleep from his eyes, shakes the snow off his head and makes a brief and grumpy appearance before vanishing again. Indeed, I find it quite reassuring knowing that we taxpayers are handing more than R200,000 a month to a person who is still alive and even possibly going to the office now and then and not, as it often feels, simply stuffing more money down the clogged toilet of cadre deployment.

Still, if anyone was wondering if Gordhan was a force for reform and New Dawnism in the ANC, Wednesday’s astonishingly hypocritical performance should have ended that fantasy once and for all.

The cause of Gordhan’s strop, of course, was De Ruyter’s bombshell interview with e.tv’s Annika Larsen, in which the outgoing Eskom CEO alleged that the ANC is trying to “water down governance” about $8.5bn handed to South Africa for its energy transition at COP26.

According to De Ruyter, when he told a “senior government minister” about his concerns, “the response was essentially, ‘You know, you have to be pragmatic — to pursue the greater good, you have to enable some people to eat a little bit’”.

Now, I don’t have to explain the weapons-grade cynicism and hypocrisy it takes for a member of the ruling ANC cabal, presiding over cascading failures in almost every aspect of life in this country, to lecture anyone about doing their job properly.

De Ruyter also talked about his alleged cyanide poisoning, and how, instead of dispatching the Hawks to deal with a clear and obvious attack on the head of a strategic national resource, the state sent two idiot detectives who thought cyanide had something to do with sinuses. (That’s not a joke, by the way, and Larsen should be commended for managing not to vomit on the carpet as De Ruyter told that particular story.)

Punxsutawney Pravin, however, was having none of it, telling the press on Wednesday that CEOs should “keep their focus on the job at hand and make sure that it is done as proficiently as possible”.

Now, I don’t have to explain the weapons-grade cynicism and hypocrisy it takes for a member of the ruling ANC cabal, presiding over cascading failures in almost every aspect of life in this country, to lecture anyone about doing their job properly.

But what Gordhan said next was pretty special.

“What’s important is that CEOs of any entity, including Eskom, should not be involved in open political debates or assertions, and where they have political views, that is their private business and they are welcome to express those views privately.”

It goes without saying that De Ruyter expressed almost no party-political views in the interview with Larsen. All he did was describe, without naming any names, a government at best tolerating and at worst committing corruption at Eskom, the attempt on his life, and the extent to which literal mafias, granted maintenance contracts, are sabotaging Eskom infrastructure so they can keep getting paid to fix it.

But even if he’d stood on his chair, raised a megaphone to his mouth and bellowed “The ANC broke Eskom, because the ANC breaks everything it touches”, it still wouldn’t have been one billionth as unprofessional and stupidly partisan as what the ANC has done in the last decade.

Mostly, it wouldn’t have been one billionth as insulting. Because what Gordhan was really saying was this: the ANC can publicly inflict its political views on our towns and cities, our schools, our hospitals, relentlessly thrusting its archaic and disgraced ideas about Soviet-style centralisation and cadre deployment into every aspect of our lives, even our private lives, but we must keep our criticism of that ultra-political incursion private.

The ANC is allowed to spray its noxious politics all over us, all the time, but if any of us wonder aloud whether it’s a good idea for senior ministers to be tolerating corruption, or wonder how to tackle country-ending mafias, well, you see, that’s unprofessional.

Luckily, I’m not the CEO of Eskom or indeed of anything, so let me say what De Ruyter didn’t, perhaps because non-disclosure agreements are a thing: the ANC broke Eskom. The ANC made stage 6 load-shedding, and are working on stage 8. And if we don’t vote dangerous hypocrites like Gordhan out of power, Ground-To-A-Halt Day will happen 365 days a year.